Three-dimensional (3D) printing is a type of additive manufacturing where the shape of a printed object is modeled incrementally, layer by layer, to make a solid 3D object from a digital model by laying down successive layers of material in different shapes. Some 3D printers are capable of successfully printing features that are less than 15 microns wide. However, many 3D printers are still heavily constrained by their supported resolution. This includes 3D printers using certain printing materials, such as metals. For these printers, the effective minimal printable feature size is often in the range of 0.1 to 1 millimeters, which leads to problems because many thinner features in 3D objects cannot be printed correctly using such 3D printers.
One approach employed by current 3D printer software to handle thin features is to deposit material uniformly across the volume of a 3D model corresponding to an object to be printed. An example of this is shown in FIG. 1 with printed material 106 being deposited over an input object 102. One problem with this approach is shown in the outline of the printed object 114 in FIG. 1. Because the minimal size of the deposited printed material 106 is equal to the minimal feature size 104, f_min, the printing process effectively offsets the outline of the object 114 by f_min/2 (see dashed outline in FIG. 1), and the material deposited 106 on the outline spreads to the exterior. While the thin components 108 of the input model 102 can be represented in the printed object 114, they are often too thick because the effective resolution is lowered to as low as one-half of the maximum possible resolution (see, e.g., the altered thin components 118). Another drawback of this approach is that the implicit offsetting of the surface degrades any fine detail, such as the surface details 110 shown in FIG. 1, that are present on the object surface (see, e.g., the altered surface details 112 in FIG. 1).
Another approach is to preserve the exact size of the object, which can be achieved by insetting the outline of the printed shape inwards by half of the minimal feature size (see insetted version of model 212 in FIG. 2). This compensates for the minimal size of deposited material as described above so that the effective size of the printed object 214 is approximately the same as the shape of the model 102. However, a disadvantage of this approach is that the insetting eliminates all components thinner than f_min as shown in the printed object 214 with eliminated thin components 218 in FIG. 2.